Clifford Stoll was right; the web isn’t nirvana
techaeris.com
techaeris.com
"This is a video of a presentation given by Clifford Stoll at a Sequent User's Group 'Enterprise Solutions Summit' in Portland, OR. I happen to find this program on a DVD as I was cleaning out some old boxes and figured it was probably the only surviving copy of this presentation in existence. Of all the programs, presentations and lectures I've attended over a long career in the IT field, this presentation has always stuck with me and I figured it would be a shame if this were lost to the world forever. I hope you enjoy the presentation as much now as I did then." -- William Danger Newman
I continue to feel like computing is a deep rich pool, but that consumerization has us all splashing around in the kiddy pool. There's a lack of candor, dishonestly, that we work so hard to hide complexity.
There was a neandering & fun diatrabe I ran into called "Make Me Think"[1], that has gorgeous & beautiful simple pictures of how we've tackled complexity over the years: making the user juggle it all, now with user-centered design we try to pre-plan & take on the complexity from a design level so to users everything "just works." But we've kind of robbed the world of learning, of mastery, of adaptability. Stroll portrays computing as shallow, as an activity akin to a slideshow, and happening upon this post feels serendipitous similar.
Having watched the talk, the knowledge versus information aspect seems like the core axis though, the push for deepness in our cybermedias. It loops quickly back around to my other comment in this thread, on expecting more overlays, more peer-based context building, more wayposting to have emerged[2], and instead, a tyranny of flatness having become utterly dominating.
[1] https://ralphammer.com/make-me-think/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30269350 (67 points, 3 months, 24comments) (and previously with less success https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fralphammer.com%2Fmak...)
The singular piece of revolutionary tech of the last millennium which actually has improved lives for millions, is the laundry machine, which unlocks many hours of peace and relaxation or education or whatever is needed, for the poor, particularly to the benefit of women who traditionally washed our clothes. The Internet is nice, but perhaps not as pivotal as that invention.
But Im sympathetic too.
One thing that stood out, that- by seeing tagging & aggregators, de.icio.us and digg- I thought wecd be much better at by now is layering context & critiques, building trust & peership & review as layers atop the web page medium. Tagging, organizing, categorizing, issue-based-information-systems (IBIS), and other techniques were, I though, by now going to be voluntary overlays to help us organize & orient, to discern. There have been neat projects- e.g. Newstrition[1] browser extension- but generally progress has been minimal. Im surprised after all this time how right Stroll still is:
> Lacking editors, reviewers, or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.
There is infinite data available to you and infinite ways to consume it. You — essentially anybody — can take an entire degree curriculum taught by top professors online for a ton of subjects if you don’t care about getting credit toward a degree. That degree of democratization of knowledge was absolutely unfathomable in the mid-20th century, when Stoll was likely born.
It’s important not to let Facebook and Twitter and the dark side of things completely obscure your vision.
But online spaces have some kind of free-for-all area, & it's usually a shit show. I have a pretty good, sharp, caring, concerned set of friends on Facebook, it's actually pretty ok, but I definitely see plenty of others with just madcap bedlam in their feeds all the time. Most sites have comments, and even here where it's pretty good, I feel like 20% are actively misleading, are concealing & have a non-straightforward agenda they're pushing.
There's a duality right? Good and the bad? There's plenty of amazingness. But we allow & celebrate interaction, it's an interactive medium, and so much of the activity comes from a shouting class, from borderline lunatics, from warped concerns. I absolutely celebrate the good, I love Twitter dearly (though I've been away for a long time), but there's so little guiderails & helpers, it takes such a mature mindset to navigate & orient oneself amid the seas of so much teaming noise & din.
And we haven't really made gains in taming the wild. There's kind of still this dual, of high tower work, and the mass spaces. What younger me was expecting was that we'd refine & build better visibility, so we could be more enlightened & better understand what we ran across, collectively, wherever we went. There's been little progress in layering in context. The shouting has gone up.
> Saturated with editors, critics, and reviewers…
and it still works.